


Falling

by Callisto



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Coda, Episode Related, Episode: s02e16 Dead Drop, M/M, Pre-Slash, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-08
Updated: 2011-04-08
Packaged: 2017-10-17 18:34:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callisto/pseuds/Callisto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>A pale, shaky anthropologist was babbling about stress bonds in disparate groupings by the time Jim got to him. Judging from the glazed look of gratitude Joel shot him as he stepped up behind the pair, the discourse had been going a while.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Falling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ancasta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ancasta/gifts).



> Beta'd by the lovely Kat and Izzie.

The kid was going to give them both a heart attack at this rate. One a piece at four in the morning. Sure, Jim ought to be able to dial down and get some shut-eye. Except he couldn't, because around Blair his brain didn't seem to have quite so much say as to where the dials went. Down, up or middling, the man had a habit of getting through. So when Blair had dropped in that elevator, Jim was there, dropping right along with him, heartbeat and pulse spiking the bitter taste of adrenaline into his mouth.

Which was acceptable while Blair was actually in the elevator and he was wrapping his knuckles around a microphone. But which sucked monumentally when he was stretched out in his own bed on some freshly laundered Egyptian threads, and the one person keeping his dials twitching was downstairs in his own bed, falling nothing more than an inch to the left of his pillow each time his body relived the plunge and jerked him awake.

“Sonova _bitch_!”

Blair.

Jim thumped his pillow, an echo of Blair doing the same. It was going to be a long night.

******  
 _A few hours previously_

A pale, shaky anthropologist was babbling about stress bonds in disparate groupings by the time Jim got to him. Judging from the glazed look of gratitude Joel shot him as he stepped up behind the pair, the discourse had been going a while.

Blair turned to him, eyes ablaze. “Hey Jim, where you been? You shoulda seen me, man, never knew welding could be such a rush! I was telling Joel here that adversity is like one of the most empowering exp-” Jim had no choice at that point but to move into the space those animated hands opened up and just grab hold, muffling the end of that sentence against his Kevlar as he wrapped him up.

Just for a second, just to make sure.

One heartbeat, two . . .

“I’ll give you adversity, Chief. Adversity is fifty flights of stairs. In a vest.”

“Jim-”

“Just delegate the artefacts a little in future, that’s all I’m saying.”

He let him go, surprised by how unembarrassed he was to be standing there with his arms still loosely around this man in the middle of the to and fro bustle of a whole bunch of people who knew him. He remembered that strange back hug from Blair after the Colonel had messed with him, and thought he understood it better now.

“Delegate,” repeated Blair, quietly, rubbing the back of his head and looking up. “I . . . uh, yeah, okay, Jim.”

Jim stared, wondering why Sandburg hadn’t stepped away and why they were still looking at each other. He swallowed, he had to say something. Fast, or this was going to get strange.

“Your head okay?”

For some reason that worked. His arms slid off as Sandburg stepped away, still rubbing his head. They turned as one and began heading for the exit.

“Well, whacking the floor with it a few times wasn’t one of my better ideas, but then, everything’s relative, right? I mean, I could be jello on the floor-”

Jim stopped walking. “A lovely image, Chief. Thank you.”

A hand whacked his shoulder and got him moving again.

“Doofus. What I’m saying is that in the grand scheme of things a tender spot in the back of a man’s head is a small price to pay for-”

“-not being jello.”

He got another shoulder whack for that, a peculiar Blair snort, and anything strange dissolved in its wake.

*****

Which brought them back to Blair still falling and Jim still waking. A hiccup, then the rhythmic gurgle of swallowing and teeth nipping on glass, the soft thunk of the refrigerator. Then tiptoes and . . . nothing.

Odd.

Blair had stopped in socked feet in the middle of the floor, probably at the foot of the stairs. Even sentinel sight couldn’t tell which way his head was tilted but Jim had a fair idea it was up the stairs in his general direction. The heartbeat was a tad spiky, but then Blair was sleepless and still falling.

“Uh . . . Jim?”

Sentinel soft, just in case, and Jim thought about not answering. For one self-absorbed second, he thought about just closing his eyes and taking the out he always had with these kind of late-night whispers.

He cleared his throat. “What do you need, Chief?”

“Aw, man. I woke you, didn’t I?”

How to answer such a stupid question?

“Sandburg, I was up.” Certainly not with the truth. A socked foot on a step. Then off again. Then . . . what? Hovering?

Jesus.

“I’ll . . . goodnight, Jim.”

“Not so fast there, Chief.” Unable to take another indecisive foot on or off the step, Jim put both his on the floor, checked to see he at least had his boxers on, and found himself at the top of the stairs before he’d really thought about it.

“Jim?”

There was puzzlement on Blair’s face. But there was also something like relief, and that had Jim all caught up with how in the early dawn light in a burnt red T and gray sweats at the foot of his stairs, Blair looked every inch the grad student home from the frat house. A gloriously alive grad student. Home. With him. Not in any other kind of house.

But Jim had still not learned to be careful what he wished for around this man.

“I can’t stop falling, man. Which is weird seeing as how we didn’t actually fall. I mean, we fell, yeah. Man, we fell. But it was a couple of floors, a jolt or two, nothing gravity defying. So my subconscious still has me in flight mode, which makes me wonder how long it’s gonna be before I process all this-”

Alive, then, but going a mile a minute.

“Blair.”

Blair’s hands were opened up and going again, raking through his hair now as Jim’s interruption ground him to a sheepish halt. And then Jim knew what to do. The trick was going to be getting Blair to agree.

“You were coming up the stairs.”

“Yeah, well, no. I mean, it’s 4am, Jim.”

“So?”

“So it’s 4am!”

Jim bent his head to hide a smile. For all those letters after his name, Sandburg could be stunningly inarticulate at times. Like at 4am, in fact.

“What are you smirking at?”

Jim decided there and then that a good offense was the way to go. “Chief, do you have any idea of the shit and the fallout that’s going to hit us as soon as Simon lifts his head tomorrow? So enough already. Either you come up and share a mattress with me, or I come down and share a coffee with you. Personally, I was hoping for sleep because, as you so rightly keep saying, it is 4am. But, hey, your call.”

Blair worried his lower lip and stared at his feet for so long that Jim felt the edges of a zone creep in. He shook himself out of it, he was not going to zone on Sandburg’s fucking _socks_. Then the kid’s head came up again.

“Share a mattress?” It came out somewhere between a squeak and a croak and Jim resisted the urge to sigh or bash his head against something. Sandburg, maybe.

Of course that was the part the kid was going to latch on to. Hell, it was the part Jim was latching on to. But he knew in his heart that what he was offering right now, right here, was really sleep. All he needed was his hand on an arm, a shoulder – an earlobe, even – anything that would tie them together, one subconscious to another. They had started doing that sometimes. Blair figured it was a Sentinel/Guide thing, some physical need to reconnect and recharge after a close call that had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with psychological markers deep in Jim’s senses somewhere.

The kid had gotten so excited the first time Jim rested a hand on his leg because he just needed the damn contact for a minute. It had taken all Jim’s patience and gratitude for a still-in-one-piece Blair not to whack him upside the head with the spiral bound notebook he had then taken onto the sofa with them. But that was it, wasn’t it? To sit there with your hand on your partner on the sofa with Sports Night in the background was one thing, to do it on a mattress with nothing in the background and half a pillow-space between you, was something else.

Though he remembered an upright back stroke in the kitchen one time, up and down soft brushed cotton. Blair had been doing the dishes, battered and bruised after being thrown out of a moving truck, and Jim had just come up beside him, splayed his fingers across that warm back and stroked. No words, and maybe five minutes had passed with Jim just doing that careful stroking, feeling those muscles moving under that skin as Blair moved his hands back and forth in the sink, his heartbeat soaking in through the very tips of Jim’s fingers as they-

“Okay. I . . . okay. We need to sleep. Jim? Hey, you zoning a little, big fella, or are you just pooped?”

Jim grunted and focused on the smiling face in front of him. Maybe he had been zoning a little, it was hard to tell when he was this tired. He turned and moved back toward his bed, gratified that Sandburg didn’t hesitate to follow.  
“Pooped? We have to get you a new vocabulary. Don’t think I’ve been pooped a day in my life.”

“Yeah, yeah. Tough guy. Forgot Army Rangers don’t get pooped.”

In the end, the sleeping arrangements were far less awkward than Jim had anticipated. He found that with the kid’s heartbeat right there next to him he didn’t need to put a hand on him after all. So he lay on his left side, turned toward Sandburg just to be sure, and Sandburg lay on his back contemplating God knows what on the ceiling. Jim shut his eyes, breathed in that faint musk and apple that always said Sandburg to him no matter what soap or shampoo the man used, and felt his mind shut down a little more.

A rustle of movement on the adjacent pillow and Jim knew he was being looked at. He braced himself.

“So, how did you know, man? How did you know I wasn’t sleeping? My heartbeat, right? Or . . . wow, were you falling right along with me? Because that would be . . . shit, I know it’s a pain in the ass, but it’s also, like, the coolest thing in the world, Jim. You know, I could-”

“Sleep,” said Jim, as clipped and terse as he could make it. Without opening his eyes, he put the palm of his right hand on that juncture at the base of Blair’s neck. Not quite a slap, but he felt him flinch nevertheless. He patted his fingers on the bones there more gently, feeling the chest suddenly rise and fall, the breathing falter. “Now, Blair,” he whispered. A swirl of heartbeats, a swallow, and Blair’s eyes closed again. An imperceptible nod on the pillow and then Blair’s breathing slowly but surely evened out under his fingertips. Jim let the sound take him down to oblivion, his hand never moving as he held on and kept each of them from falling.

*******  



End file.
